Month: November 2007

Opinion Polls 2.0?

America is a nation obsessed with opinion polls – the recent poll on Iran, the one on electability to name a couple. Thanks to globalization (the other word for export of American culture), India and the the rest of the world is soon following suit (Asia’s sexiest women, generic polls on all and sundry) at an unbelievable pace. This means its time for America to step up and take the lead into the next phase — brain study! The study has already sparked off a controversy.

Irrespective of this controversy and the technicalities of this study, isn’t this kind of study a needless stretch? Time to call for a poll “time out!”

Gulistan: Another Shalimar Alternative

Gulistan Restaurant
34579 Alvarado Niles Rd
Union City,CA,94587
Telephone: 510 471-6536

If you are a big fan of Pakistani food and a frequent visitor of Shalimar or Pakwan in the bay area, I recently discovered an alternative that you might want to try. The place is relatively small, clean and homely. It appears to be family run and the owners are Bangladeshis. So if you like Bengali food, Gulistan might be an interesting option especially because of some fish menu items. Price-wise, this restaurant is a little more expensive than Shalimar. Nevertheless, worth a try.

Gmail Upgrade Causing Pain?

Google appears to be upgrading its Gmail version behind the scenes. You will notice a link at the top for New Version/Older Version. Unlike Yahoo! which gives you a choice right upfront about whether you would like to upgrade to its new email or not, Google chooses to upgrade users behind the scenes without any prior notice. The good news is that the new version is not dramatically different. The bad news is that the end users automatically becomes a QA head for Google! I recently had to struggle with recovering an email that was in Draft mode. No matter how many times I clicked on the Draft email it simply wouldn’t come up. Then it struck me that this might have something to do with new version. I promptly switched back to the older version and I didn’t have any issues from then on. Moral of the story, when in trouble with Gmail, switch back to older version.

Nevada Democratic Debate: CNN Goofed!

The Nevada Democratic debate was very poorly handled by CNN. The cheering and booing by the crowd at various stages of the debate was very annoying and adversely affected the debates. To start with, these debates are more for sound bites than for giving you any insights on the candidates themselves. The crowd intervention just made it worse.

Hillary Clinton appeared a lot more defensive and a lot less confident than she did in the previous debates. John Edwards completely “blew it” when he responded to the “gender card” question. Obama hurt himself a bit when he appeared to waffle on the issue of drivers licenses. Joe Biden bolstered his case by being crisp and to the point (unlike his regular long winded style). Bill Richardson didn’t help his case by saying that “human rights has greater priority over national security”. 

These debates are fast becoming boring and repetitive. A series of one on one “Charlie Rose type” interviews is certainly better at giving voters insights on the candidates. The good news about these debates is that they force politicians to give direct short answers while they are usually accustomed to long-winded often evasive responses. The bad news though is that in its current form these debates are nothing more than “made for TV” dramas with little depth and substance.

It is not enough to simply know what a candidates’ stand on a certain issue might be. It is equally important to know why and how they arrived at that position on the issue. How a candidate thinks is equally if not more important than his or her stand on specific issues. Unfortunately, these debates give you only the positions and the follow-on spin associated with it and not the real rationale and thinking behind the stand. The driver’s license for illegal immigrants being a case in point. Reducing the challenges facing the country to simple yes or no answers is wrong, bad and is most often misleading. Besides, a debate is really a battle of ideas, not a bunch of one-liners slapped together that sound good and make good press!

Microsoft Home Server

It is amazing how things have changed over the years in the world of home computing. Computers have become ever more powerful. Dell (and other PC vendors) today sells a desktop for about $600 inclusive of a flat panel monitor, 160GB hard drive and 1GB of RAM. Microsoft Vista requires a minimum of 1GB RAM (this means you better make sure you have at least 2GB!). There was a time when you could not buy a monitor for the same price! 

Well, if you thought this was a big change. Enter the next phase — the home sever. Over 10% of the US population has over 4 PCs at home. If both husband and wife are working regular jobs, that usually means two laptops, plus a home computer for general use. One additional computer is not a stretch. This means you have shared internet access, hence a router, plus four computers, all in one home! It is not in the least bit surprising that Microsoft and its hardware partners are launching a home server to handle common tasks like backup, virus protection etc.

While this vision of a home network is a clear extension of the expanding home computing market, it does come at a time when the “Google vision” is one that is based on the concept of remote hosting. All vendors including Microsoft, Google, AOL, Dell and others offer remote storage and other similar services.

This does raise the question about what the best recommended approach might be for home networks. Years after the failed concept of the NetPC, the jury is still out on the best approach, except that it is now being applied to the home PC market. For now, it still looks like the Microsoft vision has the edge/lead until the dust settles on all the Web 2.0 technologies that promise to deliver a host of remote applications all available over the internet.

Perhaps its time for a new breed of independent “home networking consultants or sys admins for the home!” (if they don’t already exist).

Facebook Social Ads: First Impression

Facebook introduced a widely publicized platform for advertisers and businesses the other day. Despite a number of naysayers, I think the Facebook approach to advertising has both merit and novelty. The basic principle that my friends are likely to have an interest in something that appeals to me (and that they wouldn’t mind knowing about it when they login to Facebook) is sound in my opinion. Some of the privacy fears expressed are very similar to the early days of gmail and will phase out over time. However, the ads creation and management process is not without flaws. Here are a few pain points that I came across right away.

1. Facebook Flyers have been phased out for the most part with no prior notice whatsoever. You can’t create new flyers or re-start “paused” flyers.

2. There is no recommendation per se from Facebook about Flyers. Should advertisers continue keeping their flyers? Or is it better to switch to social ads?

3. Editing the text of a Social Ad after it has been created is not possible. Likewise you can’t change the parameters like the target audience once the ad has been created. You have to delete the ad and create it all over again.

4. Facebook Insights (the part that shows you the cool graphs) uses Adobe Flash. This is really painful (in Firefox). Never works no matter how many times you install Flash.

5. The much hyped Facebook pages seem to be well hidden for some reason! I could never find the NY Times page or any other pages setup by businesses for that matter.

6. Once you create a Facebook page there seems to be no way to invite your friends to becomes fans! So you are left with a page that you can’t notify others about and others can’t find it either!

Many of the issues I had with Facebook Flyers exist with social ads as well. In general, the UI takes some “getting used to” unlike Google Adwords or Yahoo (who did a nice job of adapting the Adwords flow for the most part)

Kumble to Lead: Selectors Got it Right

The decision to give Kumble the top job in Test cricket is a commendable move. Dhoni has shown the right signs to be capable of the job, but it won’t hurt for him to play some more Test cricket before taking on the task in the future. Kumble is a certainty in the team, does not play ODI cricket and has utmost a couple of years to go before retirement. So giving Kumble the job is uncomplicated. Besides, it is a fitting response to someone who has served Indian cricket so well over the years but has got a lot less of the conventional recognition that is mostly reserved for batsmen and all-rounders.

Different Game, Different Teams

Cricket has evolved to a point where there are three distinct forms of the game. It is a little surprising that more teams don’t go in for different teams for different forms of the game. Even the mighty Aussies are struggling to dominate the T20 form.

Being the numero uno in T20 and having a large talent pool, perhaps its a good time for India to take the lead in having different teams. For instance, India could very easily have two good teams each for Tests and ODI.

Test: Jaffer, Karthik, Dravid, Laxman, Sachin, Ganguly, Dhoni, Powar, Kumble, Sreesanth, Zaheer, Rohit Sharma, Yuvraj Singh, VRV Singh (or the best wicket taking fast bowler India can find).

ODI: Gambhir, Uthappa, Yuvraj, Dhoni, Karthik, Badrinath, Manoj Tiwari, Irfan Path, Yusuf Pathan, RP Singh, Harbhajan Singh, Joginder Sharma, Suresh Raina, Piyush Chawla.

With Kumble being named Test captain, perhaps its time to think on these lines?

Nice Try, Mr. Guiliani!

“I believe in God, I pray to God, pray to Jesus for guidance and for help,” Mr. Giuliani said. “I have very, very strong views on religion that come about from having wanted to be a priest when I was younger and having studied theology for four years in college, it’s an area that I know really, really well academically. I understand the history of religion. Man and women’s relationship to God is one of the strongest, if not the strongest motivating thing in human history.”

The people who matter seem to have believed him. Or have they? In either case, I guess Mr. Guiliani’s strategy paid off!

Top 10 Improvments Needed in Facebook Ads

Facebook with its 50M+ user base is now uniquely positioned to give advertisers the ability to target potential customers based on a host of information that even the mighty Google Adwords does not provide (if you are wondering what all this fuss was about Open Social, this is it!) today.

Want to target an ad at users (male, female or both) living in Cupertino, CA in the age range 25 to 35 with college degrees and conservative political views? Facebook lets you do this, while Google Adwords doesn’t. While Google gangs up with other social networking wannabes, Facebook has the challenge of catching up with Google on a number of fronts while rapidly adding to it 50M+ users. The odds are heavily stacked against Facebook but even marginal improvements could quickly attract and possibly retain advertisers.

Listed below are a few upgrades/fixes that are desperately needed in Facebook’s ad capabilities.

1. Once you create an ad, you can’t edit it. You have to delete the ad and create a new one. This is the most painful aspect of Facebook ads.

2. The text box where you enter the ad description is most annoying. When some text is not acceptable like an email address or a word, the system just gives you a generic message without telling you what the problem word might be.

3. You can’t target ads to difference countries at the same time. For instance, I can’t target an ad to South Africa and the US at the same time.

4. You can’t have ad variations. That is, the same ad with identical parameters but worded differently.

5. The reporting facility at this point is very very minimal. Compared to Adwords it is virtually non-existent. Facebook tells you nothing about who clicked your ads! (you could track this on the ad lading page).

6. Whatever reports are currently available should at least be available for export as Excel.

7. Analytics (maybe its time to buy an analytics company like Google did). There is no analysis available on the ads that you create, goal conversions, metrics etc. Ability to target ads is very powerful and can generate lots of clicks in a very short period of time. But lots of clicks with no idea where these came from is of little use.

8. The Keywords option in Facebook is not properly explained. Since Facebook is not a conventional search engine it doesn’t directly apply, but since its available as an option in the ad creation interface it could be better explained.

9. There is no way to control when your ads appear. i.e., dates and times.

10. Last but not the least, Click fraud. How do you know if there has been any fraudulent clicks unless you have some data on the clicks? Right now it appears that Facebook gives you little data beyond the number of clicks.